May 2016 Income Report

One of the reasons I was motivated to begin my blogging journey was from seeing fellow bloggers post monthly income reports. Whether they were making money or not, I find all of these posts to be inspiring. I hope that you will be able to find my income reports inspiring as well. To clarify, these reports will not include income from my husband’s or I’s jobs. This will only include income from any of the side jobs I am trying out and from this blog if I ever start to make money from blogging. I find it all very exciting and I look forward to where this journey will take me. If you would like to learn how to start your own blog, check out my How to Start a blog tutorial through Bluehost. (This post may contain affiliate links)

I chose to start my income reports from the very beginning of my blog so that you and I have something to compare to later down the road if I do in fact become successful at this. I also plan to include updates on traffic reports once I get this figured out.

I will be posting these income reports once a month, but plan to post new content 2-3 times a week. If you would like to follow along in my journey feel free to subscribe to my blog. You can be among the first to know every time I publish a new post, by using the subscription box on the right.

My blogging journey

If you are curious to learn my reasons and motivations for beginning this blogging journey you should check out my “Why I am Starting a Blog.” To give you a brief overview, I have four major reasons for beginning this blog: 1) I need extra income to pay down some of our debt 2) I want to be my own boss and have my financial freedom 3) I want to help others avoid the mistakes I made 4) I need a creative outlet.

Last month’s income report & goals

(Please note that I changed my income report to include earned income in addition to received income, but I will separate the two to help demonstrate the growth of a blog over a long period of time. I have also updated April’s Income Report to reflect this change as well for accuracy).

Goals from May of 2016:

Add and link Facebook and Instagram accounts on my blog-Pass kind of! So…I don’t have a way to use Instagram currently so that is why I haven’t linked this account. I did link my Facebook page though!

Grow my business Pinterest account by 20 followers- Pass! I blew this out of the water! I currently have 464 followers on my business Pinterest account. That means I grew my followers on Pinterest by 410 in one month! Not too shabby in my opinion!

Grow my Facebook page by 20 likes- Pass! This one was kind of easy because I decided to send an invite to everyone on my friends list to like my page. Currently I have 57 page likes and I average about 32 people seeing my posts every time I share a link to my blog on my page. I don’t feel like this number is high at all, but I think it’s going to take some time to grow.

Grow my Twitter page by 20 followers- Pass! I currently have 32 followers on Twitter! I will say, this has been the hardest social media site to increase followers on. I think this is because I’ve never used Twitter before, but I will learn and I will continue growing!

Grow my subscribers to 15 through mailchimp.com-Fail. Honestly, I need to spend some time figuring out how to grow this. I want to offer something for free in exchange for signing up, so I plan to work on this, this month. Currently I have 7 subscribers on my mailing list.

Figure out how to fix mailchimp so my subscribers receive email updates-Pass. I think I fixed this, but honestly I haven’t spent any time testing it. However, I have been receiving my own email notifications so I’m thinking it’s working!

Create a disclaimer section-Pass. I did create a disclaimer post early on, but I haven’t posted it to my blog yet because I’m not sure where to put it. I will be working on this soon.

Design and post a logo-Fail. I attempted doing this early on this year, but honestly this is kind of hard so I hope to figure it out this month.

Create a business plan-Pass! I realized last week that I was thinking more of a business schedule than a plan. So….this was kind of a failed goal attempt, but I did create a business schedule….so I count it as a pass for what I had thought a business plan was.

Have content scheduled and planned a month in advance-Pass. I have content scheduled and planned for June and July. I hope to create a content plan for the remainder of the year though.

Have content prepared 2 weeks in advance (only requiring updates or editing)-Fail. Honestly, this is really hard to do. I am going to really focus on this next month, but I may need to cut back to only posting twice a week instead of three times a week in order to get ahead. We shall see.

Earn $50 in extra income (I feel like this may be set rather high but I am determined to succeed)-Pass! I actually earned $194.14 in extra income during the month of May!

Find at least one free lancing job-Fail. I didn’t look into this at all. However, I did message a fellow blogger about possibly guest posting on their blog. We shall see how that turns out, but I think this goal should wait until I have my blog a bit more established.

Income Earned Breakdown: $194.25

Yes that number is correct! 6 weeks in and I made $194.25 in extra income!!!! If you want to be technical $102.17 was purely passive income from my blog. The remainder was from my side hustles. Let me tell you I am so proud! I had no idea my blog would start making money so quickly! I have no idea if this can continue on into next month or even for a long period of time, but I am having so much fun regardless! I’m going to keep pushing forward and I hope to see this income stay even or grow next month! Just remember, this does not include any taxes so I will have to pay this come tax season.

It is kind of insane how much extra income my husband and I received this month. The majority of this income was from tuition reimbursement from my husband’s job, but I did receive two checks from mystery shopping, and two checks from Ebates. We definitely put this money towards good use. We have a fully stocked emergency fund, $80 went towards our vacation fund, and the rest is going towards paying down one of our loans! I can’t wait to see this grow in the future, but I know this number will most likely decrease due to the types of income we received this month. That’s okay I will just continue to push harder!

Create a document to give in exchange for people signing up on my mailing list

Earn $200 in extra income

Create a business schedule

Have a content schedule through the end of 2016

Have 2 weeks of content prepared (only requiring editing or updates)

Gain 3 new affiliate partners (bringing my partners up to 5)

Improve design and layout of blog

Grow my subscription list to 15.

Have picture of me displayed on home page

Update pages tabs

Working on ad placement for optimization

Traffic Report Breakdown

This is what my traffic report looks like from Google AdSense:

AdSense is definitely not something you can make money money from right away but my account is currently at $1.22 in under 7 weeks! That’s not too bad in my opinion. Slowly but surely I will build this up!!! You can definitely see the peak moments on days when I publish content. I’m going to also work on trying to optimize my ad placement this month.

This is what my traffic looks like from Google Analytics:

This month I had 1,208 page views, by 308 different users. My bounce rate is at 65.11% currently, but I think this is mainly due to there not being many posts on my blog yet. It’s wierd that the week of May 9-13 I had the most sessions and you can definitely tell the spikes were on the days I published posts. May 27 also had a big day, but I didn’t publish anything that day. So…I will be working on increasing my page views as time goes on, but I’m not too disappointed with 1,208 7 weeks in. Next month I hope to increase this to 2,000 page views throughout the month.

The top picture shows how many impressions I received during the month of May. I’m not sure why I got such a spike on May 25th, but my average is 186. Hopefully, I can increase this next month. I’m hoping to raise this to 300 next month!

The second pictures shows my monthly viewers. Obviously, I saw great growth in this area. Remember, this is just on my business Pinterest account and not my personal Pinterest account. I hope to increase my monthly viewers to 2,000 on Pinterest by next month!

Each month I hope to make big improvements on the quality, design, content, and growth of this blog. If you can share my page on your social networks that would be fantastic! If you have any advice I’m open to that as well!

I look forward to see how next month turns out!!!

Please share and like my posts and I always love to read your comments!

Share below how your month of blogging and making extra income turned out!

5 Comments

Hey Francesca! Thanks for checking in! The two I am partners with right now are BlueHost and ShareaSale. I’ve done a lot of research through other blogger’s income reports. Honestly, I’d be surprised if I did this well again next month but here’s hoping!